Frank London always has a busy schedule. Between the Klezmatics and his numerous side projects (the most recent being a Latin jazz-Jewish fusion essay with Arturo O’Farrill), there is never a convenient time for London to be interrupted.

Michael Winograd has a new CD being released this month with launch gigs in Boston and Brooklyn. December 2012 is not a rest period for him.

When he talks about Jewish music, Netanel Hershtik uses a word that one doesn’t usually hear from a musician preparing for an upcoming concert: mission. .

Given that he is a 14th-generation cantor — no, that is not a typo; his family can trace its history of hazanut back that far — the idea of singing Jewish music as a “mission” may not seem incongruous, but the intensity with which he speaks of it informs you instantly that Hershtik is not merely paying lip service. He firmly believes in it.

Just a few years ago, Alicia Jo Rabins didn’t know much about the workings of Wall Street; she hadn’t yet heard of Bernard Madoff. But when the story of the largest Ponzi scheme in history unfolded, the musician, poet, Jewish educator — and admittedly broke artist — was captivated by the details of Madoff’s fraud.

Jack Mendelson remembers well the words of his principal teacher, the great cantor Israel Alter.

“He would always say, ‘Hazonos iz improvizatya,’ hazanut is improvisation,” Mendelson, himself a great cantor today, recalls with a laugh. “All the really great ones would go off on the pulpit, and the cantors who were really musically trained would improvise on the concert stage as well.”